The Three In British Lore

a philosophic essay

"The matter of Britain"

That's what scholars call the King Arthur tales – and have done since the Middle Ages at least – as if that vast dense web of scenes, characters and plots – living new in every generation even since before King Arthur coalesced into a single name – as though those stories are the very substance of a land. And indeed, the ageless worldwide Triple Goddess, she who always is the land, permeates those tales for good and all.

She who is birthed and brings to birth and takes away; she who arms and tames and rules; allure of every treasure, joy of every pleasure and Fate of every doom; the human spirit's quest at every step a penetration of her mystery; her bonds within herself the binding force of every oath and spell; she is authority beyond all striving kings because she is the ground of being. At once both manifest and hidden and the filmy veil between those opposites as well, she is the self-woven cloth of reality.

In the British stories – on that gale-blown yet fertile green, sea-girt misty northern isle – this real and ultimate deity becomes the land and waters too. Wells are weird and sacred in the world these stories tell, cool breath wafting up from deep below, tended close by worthy priestesses. Above the crashing waves at rocky headlands, female beings hover in the salt wind spray. Beside a ford a ragged crone awaits. From a silver pool a woman's gleaming arm reaches up to throw a mighty weapon to a hero's hand. And when the mist comes on a certain plain, abyssal waters rise to make a mystic marsh-rimmed lake wherein a certain hill becomes the Lady's isle of immortality and apples. And through it all there is the number three. Most unmistakably, these women – mortal or immortal, sisters, cousins, mothers, daughters – quite often manifest in triplets all with similar names.

Three is a basic fact in human thought and comprehension. It is, for us at least, the first harmonic of infinity. If there are three then there is everything.

And finally we must add: Where there are three there is a fourth. Many earnest devotees of the Triple Goddess in our world today speak of a fourth figure manifesting in their lives. Among the Maiden, Mother and Crone, between the center and the last, between attainment of maturity and the descent toward death, they find a presence and identity they often call the Queen.